Republican legislators overwhelmingly support Governor Christie’s new FY 2013 budget proposal; if any of them don’t, they’ve made the strategic decision to keep it to themselves.
It’s as much a testment to Chris Christie’s political organization and popularity with the GOP base as anything else, Save Jerseyans. People still want to believe in this guy and what he’s trying to do. Count me among them.
The Guv’s old ’09 primary foe was less impressed.
After a period of relative silence concerning his former opponent’s policies, Mayor Steve Lonegan sent the following statement to his AFP-NJ email listserve earlier this afternoon:
Let me throw some numbers at you…
2010 – $29.8B
2011 – $28.3B
2012 – $29.7B
These figures are the amounts of the past three state budgets. But let’s put these numbers into context. The FY 2010 budget (Gov. Corzine’s last) included about $2.3B in federal stimulus dollars, while the FY 2011 budget included $1.03B in federal monies. Otherwise, these budgets would have been about $27.5B and $27.0B, respectively.
The FY 2011 budget, on the surface, appears to decrease spending by $1.5B as compared to FY 2010. But as our Taxpayers’ Budget for 2011 pointed out, this “decrease” was a ruse; primarily a function of a $3B pension deferral and more than $1B in cuts to state aid.
The federal stimulus dollars ran dry last year, yet the FY 2012 budget increased to $29.7B.
Since Gov. Christie took office, state spending has been on the rise. And if the governor has his way, it will rise even further.
Yesterday, Gov. Christie addressed a joint session of the state Legislature in which he outlined his budget proposal for FY 2013. The price tag? $32.1 BILLION! If enacted, the FY 2013 budget would represent an increase of more than 8% over last year’s budget. And overall spending, excluding federal stimulus dollars, would be up more than 15% relative to Gov. Corzine’s final 2010 budget.
In the coming days, more details regarding the governor’s budget proposal will emerge and require further inspection. But as of now this budget is far from austere and does nothing to rein in the Trenton behemoth. To the contrary, it grows government even further…and seems to conjure up an image of a boomerang, back to Corzine-like spending levels, rather than reflect a “New Jersey Comeback.”
